DH: Ruth gave me a t-shirt that said ‘ex-perimental’ and another that said ‘misunderstood’. She also prompted me with an original shadowbox to see if it inspired a poem. It inspired a three-part and then another, I am still thinking about. I want to call it Blood Money. Seen through red cellophane, the box features pennies glued to its three walls and floor. On the right is a spool of red thread, with a strand unraveled. And on the ceiling are ornate cloth flowers. So, the pennies from heaven, as it were, seem to fall from flowers or the artful images of natural beauty. In my mind, this suggests an allegory, though I keep puzzling over the thread. Is it a pun on ‘so’? Is it a thread of meaning? Am I invited to force what I know of her real life, where along with a career in teaching, she has taken the risk of supporting her family entirely with sales and awards for her art? She has talked about the process:

These boxes began as a family game. I limited myself to found objects and made one box to illustrate each of the 32 poems from my father’s book, Foundlings. Then I gifted these boxes to him for Father’s Day. As we all gathered around, he read one found poem after another as our family took turns guessing which box illustrated each. Later, as we got to playing the game with audiences at readings, eventually a publisher decided to put the poems and boxes together into a new illustrated book.

Shadow Boxes by Ruth K Henry.

DH: But she has recently stumped me (or trumped me) with the challenge to create a kind of grid or tic-tac-toe poems of boxes that can be read in different directions with meaning.

CA: What an incredible series of ekphrastic exchanges, it’s really electrifying! That makes me think of the way I really connect to this quote from your Perspectives: Uncollected Essays (2008).

In the spirit of Walt Whitman, I can sing my body electric, cataloguing its thoroughfares and provinces. Not biology’s map, but imagination’s, totemized fact. My eyes tour and swivel like cameras; some parts impossible to see, or rarely seen, craning in mirrors.

Indeed, your writing about the body and the way it affects identity is really thought-provoking. Your poem about scars, particularly this question: ‘Are scars the proof of wounds/or of healing?’, reminds me of John Donne’s ‘The Ecstasy’:

But O alas, so long, so far,
Our bodies why do we forbear?
They are ours, though they are not we; we are
The intelligences, they the spheres.

DH: Yes, that quote about scars is from Trim Reckonings (2023), and the memory of my parents and especially my father’s wounds and healing in ‘On Scars’, where I fear as a child ‘falling into his scar’; and much about masks and perhaps the masking of words themselves and art as attempts to touch.

CA: So, tell me more about your body of work and the body … is there a self-fashioning going on in the poems and prose?

DH: I’m not sure of what you mean by ‘self-fashioning’. Self-searching, yes. Self-pondering, with which the reader should self-consider and identify. Actually, I’ve been working on a new poem called ‘Corpus’:

I’ve only been half-conscious of a body-and-soul preoccupation in my corpus. As a writer, both I and my reader are disembodied. Communication is an effort at synapse, as it were. A smoke signal, a drum beat, notes in a bottle. I’m here, you’re there; although as we seek extra-terrestrial life, your there-ness is more a function of faith than (so far) fact. You’re there as a possibility. And if you are, perhaps there is some understanding, some identifying with, some recognition. Gender, ‘type’, class, race, education or other likenesses or differences give way to essences.

Body awareness, if not image, comes up in my essay about having a therapeutic message, ‘Embodiment’, in Endings and Beginnings (2021). Feeling tense and estranged from conflicts and reverses at work and at Ploughshares, along with grieving the loss of my best friend (writer Richard Yates), I am gifted to a professional message, where I am touched and ‘read’ by the masseuse physically, emotionally, and spiritually and have my recognition:

the rhythm built deeper and deeper towards some primitive center in me, so that I was thinking, and allowed myself to think, of being mothered and swaddled like an infant, so that I was thinking of my mother, and loving and missing her, and weeping at that deep-body memory, my grief inseparable from love, unspeakable love, being tendered, being loved: this was what I wanted and missed most in my life.

Recently with your question about ‘corpus’ in mind, I felt kindred to Doug Crandall’s long essay in SUN on ‘The Body of My Father’. Kindred to the longtime mission of ‘humanising’ disability, both physical and mental. I also found the novel Big Girl by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan interestingly kindred, with Sullivan’s background in feminist ideology and theory.

CA: So, I think we might be onto madness! Is it too soon? Haha. Your book of lyric essays (although the subtitle is ‘Notes and Essays’, I think the poetic quality of them and circling of ideas and metaphors make them lyric essays in my mind). So, knowing our shared love of Shakespeare, I’m going to say that Sweet Marjoram is a reference to King Lear. It was thought to ‘cure’ madness and so I’m wondering how does the title connect to your essays? Is it to do with human psychology, to healing, to fever dreams, to family folly?

DH: I guess I do believe with George Orwell that honesty and clarity in writing, in definitions of words serve to palliate in some degree as ‘stays against confusion’. Our times, or mine, from 1941 to 2024 (so far), and especially the past decade have led to the worst of politics by means of blurring meaning with language, and that blurring has been aided and abetted by literary theory and by global communications on the internet. I complain about this openly in my poems ‘Blurred Words’ and ‘Fake Nudes’. But my concern runs through these particular essays and the form I posed for myself. I had a long exchange with Danny Lawless of Plume Editions about the title of these essays. But Sweet Marjoram seemed right, combined with the epigraph. In years of teaching King Lear, I had skipped the footnote about this phrase and thought it was meant as nonsense. But here is Edgar, an outlaw and outcast from the court, disguised as a madman, and conspired against by Edmund, his bastard brother, and when he encounters the mad King, also expelled from the court into the wild, as it were, he immediately grasps the situation. The King is demanding ‘who goes there’, as if on watch for enemies. And in an empathic flash, Edgar guesses at an appropriate password, ‘sweet marjoram’. Lear understands his understanding and says ‘Pass’. This is the spirit of my essays: a healing claim to communion.